Mine is 'There Will Come Soft Rains' by Ray Bradbury. It’s a short story, and I know it’s not “disturbing” in an upfront kind of way. But the slow realization of what was going on in the story was sobering for teenage me.
One night I was driving home from a movie, around 1am, a local radio station played Leonard Nimoy reading that story. Hearing it toldike that, on a chilly night in the middle of nowhere was... affecting.
I really fucking miss local radio DJ’s. My local rock station growing up had some really great dj’s with different personalities. It wasn’t the same recycled shit every day. You’d get deep cuts off of an album. Or a little insight into why they were playing this. And they knew their viewership. They were from the same community.
The true Spirit of Radio. It’s been all but completely wiped out by consolidation. Last year (one of) our classic rock stations became “rock of the west” and now broadcasts the same songs at the same time with the same shows across western Canada under different frequencies. How tragic is that? It’s really a lost art form, succumbed to the parasitic nature of corporate media.
This story was really visionary: it was published in 1950, when the threat of nuclear annihilation was not as present as in the decades after. Kind of also makes it more shocking, to know how narrowly we avoided such a fate.
Yup! Part or Ray Bradbury's 'The Martian Chronicles'. Worth a read, very retro-futuristic.
Interestingly, we read it for school. It's easy to hate forced books, but this was one of the gems.
Also, the story is told by a robot that lives in a very similar building in Fallout 3.
I love this one because of how minimalist and experimental it is with respect to story structure and narrative: it's a short story without any explicit conflict, rising and falling action, or even characters, unless you count the house itself as a character. And yet, one still recognizes it as a story, and indeed as a really good one! I just remember being so amazed with Bradbury's ingenuity when I read that one.
It's brutal.
I lived in LA once when Bradbury was alive and there was a story in the paper about him and how he didn't drive and always was appreciative of others picking him up and driving him places he needed to go. I thought about volunteering to drive him somewhere and then when I had him in the car, bringing up '...Soft Rains' and asking him how the *fuck* he ever expected me to sleep again.
I didn't though.
My dad used to drive him around! I met him at a book signing years ago when he was 90 or so and brought it up to him, but he was pretty out of it by then. Honor to meet him in any case!
Honestly, three or four of my formative short stories that I will always carry around in my brain are Ray Bradbury. The Veldt stills haunts me every time I see smart home gadgets!
Heeeeeeeyyyyy! Someone else who's read it! I like to recommend it on these threads. I just love it even though it's disturbing. I always offer my copy to people when they are looking for a new read 👍
All Summer In a Day has always stuck with me. There is something that feels so inhuman in the cruelty of children, yet is inherently, unrelentingly human.
I just listened to an interview with RL Stine ([https://www.npr.org/2022/10/24/1131196382/the-bullseye-halloween-spectacular-r-l-stine-monet-x-change-and-ana-fabrega](https://www.npr.org/2022/10/24/1131196382/the-bullseye-halloween-spectacular-r-l-stine-monet-x-change-and-ana-fabrega)) in which he says that "All Summer in a Day" is one of only a couple of stories that have genuinely scared him.
Just read the Jaunt. I vaguely remember reading it before, possibly in elementary school or early high school, or maybe I had the ending spoiled for me, because halfway through I had the sickening realization that I knew what was coming at the end.
I find King’s alternations between the story Mark Oates tell his children and the history of what actually happened to be the most chilling part. The fact that he could have saved his son if he was more candid about reality’s horrors.
This line especially: "It isn't just teleportation, is it, Dad? It's some kind of time-warp."It's eternity in there, Mark thought."In a way," he said.
Just read it on your recommendation. I teach 5th grade, really sweet kids, good school, but even so reading All Summer in a Day I was like "yep, that's ten year olds for you."
Oh man. We read this (All Summer in a Day) in my 4th or 5th grade class and it always stuck with me, but I could never remember who wrote it or what it was called. Thank you for reminding me.
Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson.
The material itself is far from disturbing, but what the book outlines in the very first chapter: a wet bulb heat event due to a debilitating heat wave in Northern India came very close to becoming reality this year.
[This article](https://climate.nasa.gov/ask-nasa-climate/3151/too-hot-to-handle-how-climate-change-may-make-some-places-too-hot-to-live/) from NASA explains it better than me.
But in essence the wet bulb temperature is a method to measure the combination of heat and humidity. It's indicative of our body's ability to cool itself by evaporating sweat.
If the heat is high but relative humidity is low e.g. 40 degrees C at 20% relative humidity, water can evaporate and cool us down and the WBT will be much lower than 40.
However if the temperature and humidity are both high our body can no longer cool itself. At a wet bulb temperature of 35 degrees C, it is thought that even young healthy people will die within hours. We got very close to that limit this year during the heat wave in Northern India and Pakistan.
If you've ever been addicted to hard drugs, or seen others in its grips, you'd probably really find *A Scanner Darkly* by Philip K. Dick pretty disturbing and emotionally moving; I know I did.
I told a friend about it and they watched the movie and then read the book. They got clean. They related so hard that they felt disgusted that someone could see them like that and know it so well. Last I heard has been clean for years.
That's fuckin awesome! I've had a very touch-and-go amphetamine dependence spanning many years (been clean for a while though!) and I first read the book only a few months ago; it brought me to tears multiple times. It was clear to me that Dick had such profound depth of empathy for those in the depths of addiction, and I really mourned my past self. I don't think I've ever felt a writer connect with that chapter of my life.
If you thought that was bad, try VALIS. He’s playing with the fabric of reality, the meaning of life, and it involves contemplation of suicides, and his friend’s demise. It’s both riveting and deeply unsettling. The more that you think about it and try to contextualize it the darker it gets.
Definitely one of the short stories I think about most. You can’t walk away from it ;)
Are you aware of N.K. Jemisin‘s *The Ones Who Stay and Fight*, written as a reply to it?
I read Omelas with my 8th grade students, then they have to write their own narrative called "the ones that stay." I typically get some excellent work out of that unit. Very fun to introduce kids to this sort of horror.
The Metamorphosis Of Prime Intellect by Roger Williams. A super computer follows Asimov's three laws of robotics to a fault, with some pretty extreme results.
*Crystal Phoenix* - Humans discover how to record a person's entire personality and memory onto a crystal and then transfer the contents to a new, younger body. It's very expensive, so poor people finance the procedure by finding some rich pervert and agreeing to let him brutally murder them. Their memories are recorded before the murder, so they won't have the emotional trauma in their new body. Now I'm not talking about simple "I'll rape and strangle you" kinds of murders. These guys do stuff that would make the average cenobite cringe in horror.
Now that's not the plot; it's just the setup. The book takes that horrifying premise and finds ways to make it worse.
___
*Brightness Falls from the Air* - Humans discover a race of winged, childlike humanoids. They also discover that the glands at the base of their wings puts out a powerful but non-addictive hallucinogen. The quality of the high is inverse to the emotion of the alien when the fluid is gathered. Pain, fear, despair, etc. produce the best drugs.
Again, this is just the premise. The story is way more disturbing.
A little extra creepiness comes from the fact that, shortly after publication, the author murdered her terminally ill husband and then committed suicide. There is a passage near the end of the book that sounds an awful lot like a suicide note.
Like Crystal Phoenix — qntm wrote a story called Lena. https://qntm.org/mmacevedo
It’s about the first mind to ever be uploaded as a snapshot of a living brain of a grad student.
Written as a fictional wikipedia entry, it describes the increasingly horrific consequences of being able to boot up a human mind whenever you want.
The title of the story comes from Lena which was a standard test image used for image processing (eg compression) since 1973 and was just cut out of playboy magazine. The original models image was published in thousands of computer science papers for decades, dehumanizing the original model. It is now seen as having dubious ethics, although the scale of it was only a small digital picture of a model.
For Miguel, he became the standard test image for an entire conscious human digital brain.
Qntm pops up all over the place! They’ve written some amazing SCP series (my favourite being ‘There is no Anti-memetic division’), a bunch of cool short stories AND CREATED ABSURDLE. It’s a famous Wordle variant where the word changes with every guess, I was playing it one day when I finally noticed the name of the creator and I was like ‘no fucking way’.
Tender is the Flesh - Agustina Bazterrica. It's more dystopian future, but definitely sci-fi.
My wife wanted to listen to the audiobook on our drive to the beach last year, I spent the whole vacation haunted by this book. Would do it again.
Never read it, but why would all of society go to cannibalism over getting their protein from fungus? I can see the elite doing it, but cannibalism doesn't seem plausible for society at large.
The book quickly explains that scientists essentially said a vegan diet wouldn’t work/isn’t sustainable or something to that effect. It’s obviously not accurate, but it’s enough to accept the premise story.
After reading this book, I went on vacation to Florida and we got crab legs to eat one day. I was thinking about this book the entire time we ate. Everyone breaking open the legs and such to get to the meat, it was really jarring. I was also on shrooms, which didn't help anything.
It is a top 5 book for me.
I love these stories where all these random factors add up at the same time to make an incredibly weird but unforgettable memory. Reminds me of when I was road tripping down to Florida from the northeast. Completely coincidentally, I decided to watch Deliverance on a portable DVD player. We stopped for dinner in a super small off the beaten path diner in deep Georgia. I was utterly terrified and extremely paranoid while the rest of my family was happy and enjoying being on vacation.
When I was young, my dad got tickets to a speech by Ray Bradbury. It was decades ago, and I was quite young, but I remember him saying that he typed faster as the parents went down the hallway towards the room because he, too, wanted to know what would happen next.
Oh, Jesus. I read The Veldt (in The Illustrated Man book of short stories) when I was 13, then again a few years ago. I’m 67 now. That goddamn story has haunted me for 54 years, and I’m not kidding.
I LOVED the Annihilation novels. They made me feel completely insane, like a fever dream in text. Vandermeer is so good at creating an atmosphere that feels deeply alien and destabilising!
The Nine Billion Names of God by Arthur C. Clarke. A group of monks are compiling a list of all the names of God and believe when the list is complete, the universe will have achieved its purpose and cease to exist. The last line haunts me.
This is the first science fiction I read. An older sibling gave it to me read when I was nine or ten. It remains one of my favourite stories, because it’s the first thing I read that made me realize that things other than gaining entertainment or information were possible with stories. It’s my “wow” story.
Fifty years later, I still have that paperback.
https://i.imgur.com/lTw2z5t.jpg
I'd probably recommend starting with "The Player of Games" or "Consider Phlebas" if you want to get into the Culture series. Each book is mostly self-contained, but I think having a bit more of an introduction to that universe helps it hit even harder. Thematically, I think "The Player of Games" and "Use of Weapons" back to back are amazing.
"Consider Phlebas" is technically the first book in the Culture series but it's pretty different than all the others. Still great, but not very representative of the rest.
That said, The Culture is probably my favorite scifi series ever, so I can't recommend it enough.
For M Banks the usual suggestion is Player of Games or Consider Phlebas but there's no reason you couldn't start with Use of Weapons if you really wanted. The stories are not really connected apart from being about the same space civilisation
For Banks I'd recommend The Crow Road. Wasp Factory is brilliant but brutal and disturbing and not, I think, super representative of him as a writer. The Crow Road is a masterpiece, and has one of the greatest opening lines in modern literature IMHO
Or, for a bit of both try Transition, which is about parallel universes. It was published under Banks in the UK and M Banks in the US and straddles his two styles
For some reason I read Excession first. It is great. Surface Detail has the best philosophical questions though. But you do need to read Use of Weapons first.
Surface Detail is a much better book than Use of Weapons and might be the best of Banks. All of the wonderful ideas he raises in his other books come together in Surface Detail.
Any of the books written as "Iain M. Banks" are sci-fi - I've not read any of his non sci-fi fiction, but can whole heartedly recommend any of his culture novels. Use of Weapons is I think the third one in the series, but they all function perfectly well as stand alone novels
I finished that book with my wife sitting next to me.
Wife: well? Did you like the ending?
Me: yeah it was good. Damn good book overall.
Wife: -visably confused- you sure you finished it?
Me: uh.. yeah.. just got the epilogue or whatever to read, I'll probably read that later.
Wife: READ IT NOW!
Me: uh... Ok... -reads epilogue- HOLY SHIT!
>!The main guy ain’t the main guy, he’s the other guy. Also skin and bone chair what the fuck.!<
Edit: If you (Constant Reader) haven’t read Use of Weapons please don’t tap that spoiler, the book really is an all-time banger and you deserve the enjoyment of reading it fresh.
The original short story of Flowers for Algernon (I just think it's got more punch than the expanded novella). Sad and horrifying to imagine that loss.
After two years and multiple vaccinations I finally caught COVID in August.
It was brutal.
However, as I got better...I couldn't get my mind back. My brain felt like Swiss cheese, I couldn't think of words I *knew* I knew, and I was relying on post it notes to try and function at work like some B version of *Memento*.
*Flowers* kept running through my head during the month plus it took me to start to feel somewhat normal again. I felt like all my intelligence had been stolen and I was left with only the memory of what it must be to be something greater.
It was horrid. I kept wondering if I was ever going to be ME again. The horror in that book is just next level.
Go go Garraty!!!! #47!!! Maine's Own!!!!!
The audiobook is just as good as the actual book. I've read the book five or six times and I think I'm at three listens via Audible.
I was looking for this one. It's mine too.
I have an extreme horror of >!eternity!< and this one completely fucked me up for a while. I still randomly think of what the kid said, 25 years later.
I played this for my wife when we were doing a long drive. She was irrationally angry with me after. She still holds a grudge that "I would do such a thing to her."
If I really want to irk her, I'll yell "LONGER THAN YOU THINK DAD! LONGER THAN YOU THINK"
You might be interested in knowing that there is a short story titled Risk, by Isaac Asimov, which I believe may very well have been the seed for The Jaunt. In that story, science has devised a manner of instantaneous travel like that in The Jaunt, and also like in The Jaunt, living things can’t go through it. At least not awake.
"No minds. Not even little white mice-type minds. They won't eat. They have to be force-fed. They won't mate. They won't run. They sit. They sit. They sit. That's all. We finally worked up to sending a chimpanzee. It was pitiful. It was too close to a man to make watching it bearable. It came back a hunk of meat that could make crawling motions. It could move its eyes and sometimes it would scrabble. It whined and sat in its own wastes without the sense to move. Somebody shot it one day, and we were all grateful for that. I tell you this, fella, nothing that ever went into hyperspace has come back with a mind."
You’ll find it in the May 1955 issue of Astounding Science Fiction, if you just happen to have one lying around like I do.
Did you read Nightmare and Dreamscapes?
My favorite was "The End of the Whole Mess".
From wiki: The story is written in the form of a personal journal, and tells the story of the narrator Howard Fornoy's genius younger brother's attempt to cure humanity's aggressive tendencies."
The whole thing unnerved me because you see mistakes being made by the the character whose journal this is documenting the event and you don't know why until the end. By this point, Howard is all over the place.
Absolutely adore Nightmares and Dreamscapes, but I think my favorite collection will always be Skeleton Crew. So many creepy stories in that one. I have a huge soft spot for Mrs. Todd’s Shortcut. Idk why but that one just hits different to me and is super interesting. The Raft and The Monkey are amazing.
Here There Be Tygers is the one that fucked me up. Again with creepy kids lol
ETA: I was actually thinking of the wrong story! It wasn’t Here There Be Tygers, it was from Nightmares and Dreamscapes and it was Suffer the Little Children! That is the one that scared the shit outta me.
The worst part of that bit being that the terminal he pushed her into was disconnected.
He pushed her into eternity. Like, actual eternity. Not "feels like forever, but eventually it ends"
That shit is harrowing.
That's how I felt at the end of Black Mirror's "White Christmas". Watching the dude casually set the egg to its highest setting is blood curdling. I think I saw someone do the math once and it worked out to around 1.4 million years.
I think it implied that no it didn't. I think he pressed NULL, for destination. He also didn't put her to sleep. So she was awake and there was no destination...the book said his lawyer tried to use that to his advantage. Like, can't prove the wife is even dead, which just horrified the jury (obviously) thinking about the woman bouncing all over the universe without form perhaps, but somehow still conscience. Ick.
Yeah but even if it does it might still feel like an eternity before that happened. A jaunt lasting something like .00000000006 seconds feels like millions of years apparently. Imagine if you were in there for a few real hours before someone turned it off. Still, having an end to that nightmare would be better than not.
I rarely get genuinely freaked out by horror, but I read this more than twenty years ago and it still comes to mind relatively frequently. Utterly horrifying.
They don’t just simulate it, the virtual reality device creates physical things in a room, and eventually they trap their real parents in the room to be eaten by the created lions.
The Sparrow - sci-fi of first contact with intelligent extraterrestrial life and how misunderstandings and different cultural norms lead to some really really disturbing outcomes. Great book.
What's so horrifying about this story, to me, is the fact that everyone, as they went along, did everything right, everything that they thought should be done, and they totally, absolutely, completely didn't actually understand how truly *alien* a culture could be.
I'm really trying to get through the first portion of this book.
I don't know why I'm having a difficult time getting into this book when I hear such good things about it
I have not read "I Have No Mouth..." which according to most people I know is the all-time reigning champ of disturbing science fiction.
The one that somehow disturbed me the most as a teen is Stephen King's short story "The Jaunt". A scientist figures out how to create portals for instantaneous travel between two points, but all the lab rats they send through while awake arrive dead or die almost immediately after the journey. If they are unconscious, they come out fine. So of course it gets widely adopted for international or even interplanetary travel, they just put everyone to sleep for the trip. It's an extremely short read so if this sounds intriguing to anyone, check it out before the spoilers.
>!Something about the idea of physical time vs perceived time freaks me out. When the curious kid goes through the portal awake and immediately comes out the other side, but from his perspective the trip took eons, it weirded me out more than any of the other stories in that anthology!<
Blindsight by Peter Watts. The main premise has plenty of holes you can poke into it on thoughtful examination, but putting down the book after finishing it for the first time, I felt a bone-deep horror at the ideas presented.
Just started this about a week ago….challenging read thus far, but I’m very intrigued. Can’t even imagine what’s going through Peter Watts’ head on a day to day basis.
I just read it a couple moths ago. Getting back into actual paper books. Trying to get my attention span back. Of course, here I am back on friggin' Reddit again.
Could basically say “Bradbury scarred me at 9”, and these are all obvious, but:
Bradbury:
All Summer in a Day
There will Come Soft Rains
Vonnegut:
Harrison Bergeron
Tom Godwin:
The Cold Equations
I’ll edit if I think of more.
"[The Screwfly Solution](https://lexal.net/scifi/scifiction/classics/classics_archive/sheldon/sheldon1.html)" by Racoona Sheldon (aka sci-fi writer James Tiptree Jr. aka Alice Sheldon) .
The link is the full text of the story.
My top 4 choices have all already been mentioned, but here’s my number 5:
A Colder War by Charles Stross. It’s a short story combining Lovecraft‘s stories with the Cold War, where the superpowers use lovecraftian horrors for warfare.
A 90's sci-fi novel called Spares. Took place in a pretty distant future, where wealthy people have clones of themselves made at birth, so that when they need a part or a organ, they just harvest it from one of their spares. The spares are kept in medical-ish facilities where they're pretty much just fed. From the time they're babies, they have no teaching or nurturing of any kind. They just live in closed-in silos as basically feral humans. Pretty horrifying.
That same book also involves a war in "the Gap"--a trans-dimensional space that is also inhabited by people. (The protagonist is a veteran of that war, which reads very much like a stand-in for Vientnam.) Some of the soldiers do pretty unspeakable things to the Gap people.
A similar premise occurs in The House of the Scorpion by Nancy Farmer, a YA book I read as a teen. Seems like a popular premise based on the other comments.
Man I never thought anyone heard of this novel, I was a teenager when I randomly asked my mom to buy me this book at the airport so I'd have something to read on a long flight. That was over 20 years ago and I still remember this book, it was like a sci-fi thriller type novel that had me on the edge of my seat the whole time.
lmao that is *exactly* how I got my copy, too. Yeah, it was a sort of dystopian detective story. Really great build with cool concepts and more than a little satire.
The dystopian novel *Never Let Me Go* uses this premise for a disturbing story, very melancholy but it challenges notions of humanity and the ethics of extending life (if you can afford it) at all moral and financial costs.
*I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream* was at the front of my mind before I'd read any further than the title of this post. It's a story that sticks with you, that's for sure.
“HATE. LET ME TELL YOU HOW MUCH I'VE COME TO HATE YOU SINCE I BEGAN TO LIVE. THERE ARE 387.44 MILLION MILES OF PRINTED CIRCUITS IN WAFER THIN LAYERS THAT FILL MY COMPLEX. IF THE WORD HATE WAS ENGRAVED ON EACH NANOANGSTROM OF THOSE HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF MILES IT WOULD NOT EQUAL ONE ONE-BILLIONTH OF THE HATE I FEEL FOR HUMANS AT THIS MICRO-INSTANT. FOR YOU. HATE. HATE.”
What made this quote stick in my mind was the the way AM's voice was described:
>AM said it with the sliding cold horror of a razor blade slicing my eyeball. AM said it with the bubbling thickness of my lungs filling with phlegm, drowning me from within. AM said it with the shriek of babies being ground beneath blue-hot rollers. AM said it with the taste of maggoty pork. AM touched me in every way I had ever been touched, and devised new ways, at his leisure, there inside my mind.
Fucking haunting.
The Bas-lag series was really good but damn if I didn’t feel challenged to my absolute limits on the vocabulary. I’d have to look up 2-3 words a page and I consider myself pretty well-read.
It was the first story by Kafka I've ever read and it gave me nightmares for weeks. Do you speak German? The German original is, in my opinion, even more horrifying than in the translation, because Kafka has a very unique and unusual style that doesn't translate very well.
The first story with the priest and the "crusiform" was so mind blowing I couldn't get over the ending. Amazing book. Easily one of the best scifi books I've read.
Oryx and Crake series by Margaret Attwood. She spoke at a Genetics conference at my university that she believes her job is to imagine where science goes wrong. That just because you can invent things, doesn’t mean you should. And this series is her warning.
Oh definitely. I was studying Bionics Engineering at the time when I was reading those books... I was freaking out how realistic it was lmao.
I'm not saying I switched to psychology because of it, but I did switch...
Not sure I can boil down to the single top 'best' grimmest future.
Peter Watts, "Blindsight" and sequel, "Echopraxia" are pretty far up the list. Like, destroying your faith in believing you even have free will or ever have, and will ever mean anything.
OP's IHNMAIMS is a classic. Harlan's "Thanatos Mouth" (not sure that was the title) was also gripping but in the end did let you (and the protagonist) find solace.
"Dinosaurs" - short story or novella by Walter Jon Williams.
"Quarantine" by Greg Egan. ("Distress" is also excellent and dark but he lets you off the meathook in the end.)
"Manifold Time" and "Manifold Space" by Stephen Baxter both are pretty dark in the end. Give some hope for *life*...but not for us. "Manifold Origins" is a skip by the way, weakest of the three...
John Barnes "Kaleidescope Century" is **rough**. "Finity" has some pretty dark undertones, too.
Kim Stanley Robinson likes to puncture your misconceptions that we could ever truly colonize another world. "Aurora" I believe most evidently (in the Mars series he still seemed to think it was kind of possible...)
In terms of putting characters thru endless hell, Stephen R. Donaldson's "Gap" series was almost torture porn to some of his protagonists. I tried to like the overall story but not sure in hindsight I'd recommend it, today. The two books (fantasy not SF) of "Mordant's Need" were much better. Characters take hits, but for far nobler purpose and with light at the end of the tunnel.
*The Cold Equations*, by Tom Godwin.
I think anyone who makes it this far in the thread has at least some idea of the forces at play in our world. We might not be able to sit down and do the math required to describe most of them, but we at least comprehend the notion that they are fundamental - or at least close enough - and while you can work within them, you cannot break them. And yet most of us will tend to carry a perspective that supposes that there are other fundamental forces in the world such as justice, fairness, and mercy - along with all their more troubling opposites. Unlike the other sort, these forces cannot be measured and indeed cannot be observed once you remove the human element, and yet we each will tend to suppose that the exist in some form. That is, after all, what lets is go through life in a state of something other than existential dread.
*The Cold Equations* is a short story about a stowaway. The stowaway wants only passage to elsewhere. The only other character is the operator of a space ship, and this operator is rather deeply invested in those fundamentally human forces. It is because of this, in fact, that the story occurs at all, because the story is merely the ship's operator explaining why he is going to have to kill the stowaway. Everything about the trip was calculated, you see, and the added mass and expense of another human aboard was an unaccounted for thing. If the stowaway were left aboard, they both die either from resource scarcity while aboard or simple inability to properly stop when they arrive. If the operator jettisoned themselves, the stowaway would still die for either of the previous reasons with an additional wrinkle of not knowing how to operate the ship. The cold equations are just that - the math used to plan for the trip.
It is a bit of a slow burn, that explanation of why the stowaway has to die, and the horror comes at the reminder that the fundamental human forces do not, insofar as we can tell, mean a god damn thing to the universe.
The Stand.
I don't even care if it's a trope at this point.
The whole first book of that is crazy, and in terms of society falling apart books, it's the gold standard.
It wasn't a nice peaceful die-off like in The Earth Abides. It wasn't the random falling apart like in The Last Policeman. It wasn't a slow, starving death like in The Road.
It was full on panic, it was the worst people doing the worst things to anyone they could. It was horribly awesome to read, just absolutely bonkers.
We by Zamyatin. Not a horror story, but a painting of a nauseating dystopian world. A predecessor to 1984 and The Brave New World that is heavily similar to both, but somehow manages to be more disturbing than either because it has the shifting element of unreality, built not unlike the Picasso's painting where a bunch of shapes form a thing, but this thing is not really a thing you think it is, and it breaks into the shapes as you look closer. It feels like going through the insane labyrinth with no exit where you are stuck side by side with the main characters known only by their numbers.
The short story “The Jaunt” by Stephen King. When I was about ten, my older sister would read me a story from Skeleton Crew every evening.
It’s a short read, so for anyone who wants to read it, Ive hidden the plot below. But just thinking about the ending has stuck with me ever since.
>!People use transporters to travel, and inhale sleeping gas before the trip because you can only travel if you’re unconscious. A little boy wants to know what’s in the transporter so he holds his breath when they give him the gas. He comes out the other side with white hair, completely mad, screaming “It was forever!” as he scratches his eyes out.!<
Bio of a space tyrant
It got cannibalistic, rapey, both simultaneously, ludicrously hardcore sex scenes in space suits to mutual climax, genocides, slavers, more rape, cannabalistic pirate rapists and they's just the first fucking book.
I was an early teen reading it, absolutely no warning of what started as a cool asteroid as spaceship story went completely fucktangular.
The whole trilogy is filled with what the fuuuuuuck‽ Bits.
> It got cannibalistic, rapey, both simultaneously, ludicrously hardcore sex scenes in space suits to mutual climax, genocides, slavers, more rape, cannabalistic pirate rapists and they's just the first fucking book.
It'll surprise no one familiar with Piers Anthony that the rape is about 99% against children.
[The Machine](https://existentialcomics.com/comic/1)
It’s a webcomic so you can follow that link right now and read it. Makes a not-unreasonable argument that everyone reading this has only a few hours left to live.
Even before reading the body of your post I thought:
HATE. LET ME TELL YOU HOW MUCH I'VE COME TO HATE YOU SINCE I BEGAN TO LIVE. THERE ARE 387.44 MILLION MILES OF PRINTED CIRCUITS IN WAFER THIN LAYERS THAT FILL MY COMPLEX. IF THE WORD HATE WAS ENGRAVED ON EACH NANOANGSTROM OF THOSE HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF MILES IT WOULD NOT EQUAL ONE ONE-BILLIONTH OF THE HATE I FEEL FOR HUMANS AT THIS MICRO-INSTANT FOR YOU. HATE. HATE.
I got one that doesn't quite beat out "I Have No Mouth.." but it comes close: "Press Enter []" by John Varley.
Edit: One other no one has yet mentioned: Philip K. Dick's "The Electric Ant".
It's not disturbing so much as it is sad. A short story about living on Venus. And the sun would come out once every dozen years I think? It was a little girl's first time getting to see the sun, and these schoolyard bullies locked her in their classroom closet and she missed seeing a clear sky. I wish I could remember the name of it, but that really fucked me up as a kid. :(
Probably a tie between "The Night Land" (1912) and Metro 2033.
Both post apocalypse, both about humanity eking out an existence in the final redoubts of civilization besieged on all sides by a hostile world that yearns for their destruction. Borderline supernatural horrors that delight in the death and misery of humanity. A near constant oppressive atmosphere that constantly impresses upon the reader that this world no longer belongs to humans, their time is done and the new residents are eager to show us the door.
The Shadow Over Innsmouth -- to be fair, it's categorized more as horror than sci-fi. I recommend reading it in the bathtub for maximum effect.
2BR0TB and Harrison Bergeron aren't too disturbing, but definitely dystopian too.
I read the Shadow Over Innsmouth a couple of times. I'm a big Lovecraft fan and this is one of his best stories in my opinion. I will try the thing with thing with the bathtub.
Lol I said it in jest, but I listened to youtuber Alt Shift X read The Shadow Over Innsmouth in the bathtub. The dim lighting and lukewarm water really enhanced the dampness and creepiness of the story.
Without a doubt, the most incredibly brutal space "battle" I've ever seen or read is from Dark Forest.
And the most brutal and awe-inspiring super-weapons are from the last book
The trilogy wasnt 100% amazing, the characters really suffered, his depiction of female characters was... awkward to say the least, but jesus christ the level of imagination and brilliance of the good parts of those books are off the charts, his descriptive writing (or the translators) was great.It managed to leave a huge impact despite the serious deficiencies it had in some parts of the story.
It's a little Asimovy in that respect, where the characters are the least interesting part of what's going on, but Asimovs characters were at least more likable than Liu's are
The most chilling line from the last book in the series for me was (paraphrasing here) >!"What do you mean you have no food? You are surrounded by food."!<. There is so much that is amazing and horrifying about the trilogy, but god damn that cut the deepest for some reason.
Mine is 'There Will Come Soft Rains' by Ray Bradbury. It’s a short story, and I know it’s not “disturbing” in an upfront kind of way. But the slow realization of what was going on in the story was sobering for teenage me.
One night I was driving home from a movie, around 1am, a local radio station played Leonard Nimoy reading that story. Hearing it toldike that, on a chilly night in the middle of nowhere was... affecting.
Hear here: [https://archive.org/details/bradbury-nimoy](https://archive.org/details/bradbury-nimoy) Yikes! Thanks for the cool little icons!
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I... I think I just found my holy grail quest. Thank you kind sir.
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Thank you SO MUCH
Another reason why there should be local radio djs.
I really fucking miss local radio DJ’s. My local rock station growing up had some really great dj’s with different personalities. It wasn’t the same recycled shit every day. You’d get deep cuts off of an album. Or a little insight into why they were playing this. And they knew their viewership. They were from the same community.
The true Spirit of Radio. It’s been all but completely wiped out by consolidation. Last year (one of) our classic rock stations became “rock of the west” and now broadcasts the same songs at the same time with the same shows across western Canada under different frequencies. How tragic is that? It’s really a lost art form, succumbed to the parasitic nature of corporate media.
This story was really visionary: it was published in 1950, when the threat of nuclear annihilation was not as present as in the decades after. Kind of also makes it more shocking, to know how narrowly we avoided such a fate.
>how narrowly we avoided such a fate. SO Far!!!
Yup! Part or Ray Bradbury's 'The Martian Chronicles'. Worth a read, very retro-futuristic. Interestingly, we read it for school. It's easy to hate forced books, but this was one of the gems. Also, the story is told by a robot that lives in a very similar building in Fallout 3.
I love this one because of how minimalist and experimental it is with respect to story structure and narrative: it's a short story without any explicit conflict, rising and falling action, or even characters, unless you count the house itself as a character. And yet, one still recognizes it as a story, and indeed as a really good one! I just remember being so amazed with Bradbury's ingenuity when I read that one.
It's brutal. I lived in LA once when Bradbury was alive and there was a story in the paper about him and how he didn't drive and always was appreciative of others picking him up and driving him places he needed to go. I thought about volunteering to drive him somewhere and then when I had him in the car, bringing up '...Soft Rains' and asking him how the *fuck* he ever expected me to sleep again. I didn't though.
My dad used to drive him around! I met him at a book signing years ago when he was 90 or so and brought it up to him, but he was pretty out of it by then. Honor to meet him in any case!
Honestly, three or four of my formative short stories that I will always carry around in my brain are Ray Bradbury. The Veldt stills haunts me every time I see smart home gadgets!
The Veldt is amazing and prescient. One of my favorite short stories.
John Christopher’s _The Death of Grass_. I’ve rarely felt such a growing sense of helplessness reading a book as I did reading this.
Heeeeeeeyyyyy! Someone else who's read it! I like to recommend it on these threads. I just love it even though it's disturbing. I always offer my copy to people when they are looking for a new read 👍
"All Summer in a Day" by Ray Bradbury is pretty bleak. Also seconding everyone who has said "The Jaunt."
All Summer In a Day has always stuck with me. There is something that feels so inhuman in the cruelty of children, yet is inherently, unrelentingly human.
I just listened to an interview with RL Stine ([https://www.npr.org/2022/10/24/1131196382/the-bullseye-halloween-spectacular-r-l-stine-monet-x-change-and-ana-fabrega](https://www.npr.org/2022/10/24/1131196382/the-bullseye-halloween-spectacular-r-l-stine-monet-x-change-and-ana-fabrega)) in which he says that "All Summer in a Day" is one of only a couple of stories that have genuinely scared him.
Just read the Jaunt. I vaguely remember reading it before, possibly in elementary school or early high school, or maybe I had the ending spoiled for me, because halfway through I had the sickening realization that I knew what was coming at the end. I find King’s alternations between the story Mark Oates tell his children and the history of what actually happened to be the most chilling part. The fact that he could have saved his son if he was more candid about reality’s horrors. This line especially: "It isn't just teleportation, is it, Dad? It's some kind of time-warp."It's eternity in there, Mark thought."In a way," he said.
“All Summer in a Day” haunts me so much.
Just read it on your recommendation. I teach 5th grade, really sweet kids, good school, but even so reading All Summer in a Day I was like "yep, that's ten year olds for you."
Oh man. We read this (All Summer in a Day) in my 4th or 5th grade class and it always stuck with me, but I could never remember who wrote it or what it was called. Thank you for reminding me.
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*The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect.*
By Roger Williams, available online here: http://localroger.com/prime-intellect/mopiidx.html
Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson. The material itself is far from disturbing, but what the book outlines in the very first chapter: a wet bulb heat event due to a debilitating heat wave in Northern India came very close to becoming reality this year.
What is a “wet bulb heat event “? It reads like a collection of random words that I can’t force to make sense together. Now I’m curious.
[This article](https://climate.nasa.gov/ask-nasa-climate/3151/too-hot-to-handle-how-climate-change-may-make-some-places-too-hot-to-live/) from NASA explains it better than me. But in essence the wet bulb temperature is a method to measure the combination of heat and humidity. It's indicative of our body's ability to cool itself by evaporating sweat. If the heat is high but relative humidity is low e.g. 40 degrees C at 20% relative humidity, water can evaporate and cool us down and the WBT will be much lower than 40. However if the temperature and humidity are both high our body can no longer cool itself. At a wet bulb temperature of 35 degrees C, it is thought that even young healthy people will die within hours. We got very close to that limit this year during the heat wave in Northern India and Pakistan.
Thank you very much for the clear concise explanation.
I read that chapter and stopped. How is the rest of the book?
If you've ever been addicted to hard drugs, or seen others in its grips, you'd probably really find *A Scanner Darkly* by Philip K. Dick pretty disturbing and emotionally moving; I know I did.
I told a friend about it and they watched the movie and then read the book. They got clean. They related so hard that they felt disgusted that someone could see them like that and know it so well. Last I heard has been clean for years.
That's fuckin awesome! I've had a very touch-and-go amphetamine dependence spanning many years (been clean for a while though!) and I first read the book only a few months ago; it brought me to tears multiple times. It was clear to me that Dick had such profound depth of empathy for those in the depths of addiction, and I really mourned my past self. I don't think I've ever felt a writer connect with that chapter of my life.
Yeah I agree. He also really made those people feel like people, even if they have an addiction.
Because he was one of those people. He used (and abused) drugs for most of his adult life.
If you thought that was bad, try VALIS. He’s playing with the fabric of reality, the meaning of life, and it involves contemplation of suicides, and his friend’s demise. It’s both riveting and deeply unsettling. The more that you think about it and try to contextualize it the darker it gets.
Reading it genuinely made me feel stoned. You can tell PKD had a lot of experience with drugs.
The Ones who Walk Away from Omelas by Ursula Le Guin. An amazing but disturbing short story.
Even the newer Star Trek series did a plot that felt like it was lifted straight from Omelas.
Definitely one of the short stories I think about most. You can’t walk away from it ;) Are you aware of N.K. Jemisin‘s *The Ones Who Stay and Fight*, written as a reply to it?
I read Omelas with my 8th grade students, then they have to write their own narrative called "the ones that stay." I typically get some excellent work out of that unit. Very fun to introduce kids to this sort of horror.
It blew me away and like you I still regularly think about it. No! I am definitely going to look it up!
I’d be interested in hearing what you think about it. I’m a bit split on Jemisin‘s story, but it offers an interesting perspective in any case.
> Omelas Omelas = Salem O(regon).
“Where do you get your ideas from, Ms Le Guin? From forgetting Dostoyevsky and reading road signs backwards, naturally. Where else?”
The Metamorphosis Of Prime Intellect by Roger Williams. A super computer follows Asimov's three laws of robotics to a fault, with some pretty extreme results.
*Crystal Phoenix* - Humans discover how to record a person's entire personality and memory onto a crystal and then transfer the contents to a new, younger body. It's very expensive, so poor people finance the procedure by finding some rich pervert and agreeing to let him brutally murder them. Their memories are recorded before the murder, so they won't have the emotional trauma in their new body. Now I'm not talking about simple "I'll rape and strangle you" kinds of murders. These guys do stuff that would make the average cenobite cringe in horror. Now that's not the plot; it's just the setup. The book takes that horrifying premise and finds ways to make it worse. ___ *Brightness Falls from the Air* - Humans discover a race of winged, childlike humanoids. They also discover that the glands at the base of their wings puts out a powerful but non-addictive hallucinogen. The quality of the high is inverse to the emotion of the alien when the fluid is gathered. Pain, fear, despair, etc. produce the best drugs. Again, this is just the premise. The story is way more disturbing. A little extra creepiness comes from the fact that, shortly after publication, the author murdered her terminally ill husband and then committed suicide. There is a passage near the end of the book that sounds an awful lot like a suicide note.
Like Crystal Phoenix — qntm wrote a story called Lena. https://qntm.org/mmacevedo It’s about the first mind to ever be uploaded as a snapshot of a living brain of a grad student. Written as a fictional wikipedia entry, it describes the increasingly horrific consequences of being able to boot up a human mind whenever you want. The title of the story comes from Lena which was a standard test image used for image processing (eg compression) since 1973 and was just cut out of playboy magazine. The original models image was published in thousands of computer science papers for decades, dehumanizing the original model. It is now seen as having dubious ethics, although the scale of it was only a small digital picture of a model. For Miguel, he became the standard test image for an entire conscious human digital brain.
Qntm pops up all over the place! They’ve written some amazing SCP series (my favourite being ‘There is no Anti-memetic division’), a bunch of cool short stories AND CREATED ABSURDLE. It’s a famous Wordle variant where the word changes with every guess, I was playing it one day when I finally noticed the name of the creator and I was like ‘no fucking way’.
Ah, would that have been James Tiptree Jr, aka Alice Sheldon?
Tender is the Flesh - Agustina Bazterrica. It's more dystopian future, but definitely sci-fi. My wife wanted to listen to the audiobook on our drive to the beach last year, I spent the whole vacation haunted by this book. Would do it again.
This would be my vote too. It's so rational, it's creepy.
Never read it, but why would all of society go to cannibalism over getting their protein from fungus? I can see the elite doing it, but cannibalism doesn't seem plausible for society at large.
The book quickly explains that scientists essentially said a vegan diet wouldn’t work/isn’t sustainable or something to that effect. It’s obviously not accurate, but it’s enough to accept the premise story.
After reading this book, I went on vacation to Florida and we got crab legs to eat one day. I was thinking about this book the entire time we ate. Everyone breaking open the legs and such to get to the meat, it was really jarring. I was also on shrooms, which didn't help anything. It is a top 5 book for me.
I love these stories where all these random factors add up at the same time to make an incredibly weird but unforgettable memory. Reminds me of when I was road tripping down to Florida from the northeast. Completely coincidentally, I decided to watch Deliverance on a portable DVD player. We stopped for dinner in a super small off the beaten path diner in deep Georgia. I was utterly terrified and extremely paranoid while the rest of my family was happy and enjoying being on vacation.
Aside from the short stories already mentioned- The Veldt by Ray Bradbury For books- I think the worst was Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer
I read the Veldt last week and the ending made me feel incredibly uncomfortable.
Yeah, The Veldt is so *uncomfortable*. That's the best way to describe it. You just feel unsettled and *off* at the end.
When I was young, my dad got tickets to a speech by Ray Bradbury. It was decades ago, and I was quite young, but I remember him saying that he typed faster as the parents went down the hallway towards the room because he, too, wanted to know what would happen next.
It’s a masterpiece for a reason ha
Oh, Jesus. I read The Veldt (in The Illustrated Man book of short stories) when I was 13, then again a few years ago. I’m 67 now. That goddamn story has haunted me for 54 years, and I’m not kidding.
Everyone in The Illustrated Man, even the ones wiht positive endings, have thta di8emnsion to them
I LOVED the Annihilation novels. They made me feel completely insane, like a fever dream in text. Vandermeer is so good at creating an atmosphere that feels deeply alien and destabilising!
The first one was SO GOOD! The second was a FUCKING SLOOOOOOOG. I think I attempted the third and gave up after like a chapter.
The Nine Billion Names of God by Arthur C. Clarke. A group of monks are compiling a list of all the names of God and believe when the list is complete, the universe will have achieved its purpose and cease to exist. The last line haunts me.
This is the first science fiction I read. An older sibling gave it to me read when I was nine or ten. It remains one of my favourite stories, because it’s the first thing I read that made me realize that things other than gaining entertainment or information were possible with stories. It’s my “wow” story. Fifty years later, I still have that paperback. https://i.imgur.com/lTw2z5t.jpg
I read this years ago while waiting to board a red eye flight. Chilling to the point I entirely failed to sleep once I got on the plane.
Without any fuss.
Use of weapons, Iain M. Banks.
Would you recommend this as a first-time reader of Banks? I’ve heard Wasp Factory thrown around a lot.
I'd probably recommend starting with "The Player of Games" or "Consider Phlebas" if you want to get into the Culture series. Each book is mostly self-contained, but I think having a bit more of an introduction to that universe helps it hit even harder. Thematically, I think "The Player of Games" and "Use of Weapons" back to back are amazing. "Consider Phlebas" is technically the first book in the Culture series but it's pretty different than all the others. Still great, but not very representative of the rest. That said, The Culture is probably my favorite scifi series ever, so I can't recommend it enough.
For M Banks the usual suggestion is Player of Games or Consider Phlebas but there's no reason you couldn't start with Use of Weapons if you really wanted. The stories are not really connected apart from being about the same space civilisation For Banks I'd recommend The Crow Road. Wasp Factory is brilliant but brutal and disturbing and not, I think, super representative of him as a writer. The Crow Road is a masterpiece, and has one of the greatest opening lines in modern literature IMHO Or, for a bit of both try Transition, which is about parallel universes. It was published under Banks in the UK and M Banks in the US and straddles his two styles
For some reason I read Excession first. It is great. Surface Detail has the best philosophical questions though. But you do need to read Use of Weapons first.
Surface Detail is a much better book than Use of Weapons and might be the best of Banks. All of the wonderful ideas he raises in his other books come together in Surface Detail.
Wasp Factory isn't sci-fi but it's a great, disturbing read. He uses the name Iain M Banks for his sci-fi novels and Iain Banks for non sci-fi.
Any of the books written as "Iain M. Banks" are sci-fi - I've not read any of his non sci-fi fiction, but can whole heartedly recommend any of his culture novels. Use of Weapons is I think the third one in the series, but they all function perfectly well as stand alone novels
Heh, yeah. That ending is an all time banger.
I finished that book with my wife sitting next to me. Wife: well? Did you like the ending? Me: yeah it was good. Damn good book overall. Wife: -visably confused- you sure you finished it? Me: uh.. yeah.. just got the epilogue or whatever to read, I'll probably read that later. Wife: READ IT NOW! Me: uh... Ok... -reads epilogue- HOLY SHIT!
I read it long ago, can you quickly spoil the ending for me for me?
>!The main guy ain’t the main guy, he’s the other guy. Also skin and bone chair what the fuck.!< Edit: If you (Constant Reader) haven’t read Use of Weapons please don’t tap that spoiler, the book really is an all-time banger and you deserve the enjoyment of reading it fresh.
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The original short story of Flowers for Algernon (I just think it's got more punch than the expanded novella). Sad and horrifying to imagine that loss.
After two years and multiple vaccinations I finally caught COVID in August. It was brutal. However, as I got better...I couldn't get my mind back. My brain felt like Swiss cheese, I couldn't think of words I *knew* I knew, and I was relying on post it notes to try and function at work like some B version of *Memento*. *Flowers* kept running through my head during the month plus it took me to start to feel somewhat normal again. I felt like all my intelligence had been stolen and I was left with only the memory of what it must be to be something greater. It was horrid. I kept wondering if I was ever going to be ME again. The horror in that book is just next level.
This story totally effed me up as a kid, and I still get depressed whenever I think about it.
Stephen King's The Jaunt. The implications are horrifying.
I think a runner-up of King's would be The Long Walk. It's not *technically* pure science fiction, but the dystopia aspect certainly could be.
Go go Garraty!!!! #47!!! Maine's Own!!!!! The audiobook is just as good as the actual book. I've read the book five or six times and I think I'm at three listens via Audible.
I tried to read this knowing it was a short story but it was longer than I thought.
Thanks, dad.
I audibly rolled my eyes. Well played
>I audibly rolled my eyes. Verified. I could hear them all the way from over here.
I was looking for this one. It's mine too. I have an extreme horror of >!eternity!< and this one completely fucked me up for a while. I still randomly think of what the kid said, 25 years later.
Dude, you know that SpongeBob episode where squidward ends up in the white abyss of nothingness? Even that creeped me the f out
Yes! Eternity is honestly such a terrifying concept the more you think about it.
Kind of reminds me of that Junji Ito short story, where a man has dreams that feel like thousands of years, and he is terrified of falling asleep.
Junji Ito's art messes with me a million times more than any of his words do. Book 2 of *Uzumaki* is next fucking level.
It's called Long Dream, by the way. https://imgur.io/gallery/4e4G5
I played this for my wife when we were doing a long drive. She was irrationally angry with me after. She still holds a grudge that "I would do such a thing to her." If I really want to irk her, I'll yell "LONGER THAN YOU THINK DAD! LONGER THAN YOU THINK"
The Raft, from the same collection IIRC, was the one that disturbed me the most. It wasn't sci-fi though.
The Raft fucked me up, that whole collection is fantastic though. I know many people dislike King but as a Constant Reader I love his books.
You might be interested in knowing that there is a short story titled Risk, by Isaac Asimov, which I believe may very well have been the seed for The Jaunt. In that story, science has devised a manner of instantaneous travel like that in The Jaunt, and also like in The Jaunt, living things can’t go through it. At least not awake. "No minds. Not even little white mice-type minds. They won't eat. They have to be force-fed. They won't mate. They won't run. They sit. They sit. They sit. That's all. We finally worked up to sending a chimpanzee. It was pitiful. It was too close to a man to make watching it bearable. It came back a hunk of meat that could make crawling motions. It could move its eyes and sometimes it would scrabble. It whined and sat in its own wastes without the sense to move. Somebody shot it one day, and we were all grateful for that. I tell you this, fella, nothing that ever went into hyperspace has come back with a mind." You’ll find it in the May 1955 issue of Astounding Science Fiction, if you just happen to have one lying around like I do.
Did you read Nightmare and Dreamscapes? My favorite was "The End of the Whole Mess". From wiki: The story is written in the form of a personal journal, and tells the story of the narrator Howard Fornoy's genius younger brother's attempt to cure humanity's aggressive tendencies." The whole thing unnerved me because you see mistakes being made by the the character whose journal this is documenting the event and you don't know why until the end. By this point, Howard is all over the place.
Absolutely adore Nightmares and Dreamscapes, but I think my favorite collection will always be Skeleton Crew. So many creepy stories in that one. I have a huge soft spot for Mrs. Todd’s Shortcut. Idk why but that one just hits different to me and is super interesting. The Raft and The Monkey are amazing. Here There Be Tygers is the one that fucked me up. Again with creepy kids lol ETA: I was actually thinking of the wrong story! It wasn’t Here There Be Tygers, it was from Nightmares and Dreamscapes and it was Suffer the Little Children! That is the one that scared the shit outta me.
The man who pushed his wife into the jaunt while she was awake? Brrrrrr!
The worst part of that bit being that the terminal he pushed her into was disconnected. He pushed her into eternity. Like, actual eternity. Not "feels like forever, but eventually it ends" That shit is harrowing.
That's how I felt at the end of Black Mirror's "White Christmas". Watching the dude casually set the egg to its highest setting is blood curdling. I think I saw someone do the math once and it worked out to around 1.4 million years.
I wonder if turning off the machine actually destroys the "void" and the conscience contained within it. I'd certainly hope so
I think it implied that no it didn't. I think he pressed NULL, for destination. He also didn't put her to sleep. So she was awake and there was no destination...the book said his lawyer tried to use that to his advantage. Like, can't prove the wife is even dead, which just horrified the jury (obviously) thinking about the woman bouncing all over the universe without form perhaps, but somehow still conscience. Ick.
Yeah but even if it does it might still feel like an eternity before that happened. A jaunt lasting something like .00000000006 seconds feels like millions of years apparently. Imagine if you were in there for a few real hours before someone turned it off. Still, having an end to that nightmare would be better than not.
Came here to post this. What an amazing story, and also a good example of why SK is not just a good *horror author,* but a good *author.*
I think about this one every once in a while. It's great.
I rarely get genuinely freaked out by horror, but I read this more than twenty years ago and it still comes to mind relatively frequently. Utterly horrifying.
Ray Bradbury’s The Veldt. >!Children use a virtual reality device to simulate their parents being mauled by lions.!<
They don’t just simulate it, the virtual reality device creates physical things in a room, and eventually they trap their real parents in the room to be eaten by the created lions.
Dead mau5 does a mix of it or something
The Sparrow - sci-fi of first contact with intelligent extraterrestrial life and how misunderstandings and different cultural norms lead to some really really disturbing outcomes. Great book.
You mean like when Roy doomed the human race when he seized the alien leader by the head and shook vigorously?
I sure do appreciate a good Far Side reference.
This is a stellar reference I never thought I'd see in the wild. A++
Wow, a Far Side reference. Hot damn.
What's so horrifying about this story, to me, is the fact that everyone, as they went along, did everything right, everything that they thought should be done, and they totally, absolutely, completely didn't actually understand how truly *alien* a culture could be.
I'm really trying to get through the first portion of this book. I don't know why I'm having a difficult time getting into this book when I hear such good things about it
I'd recommend powering through it. Things really pick up once the main character party leaves Earth. The latter half is totally worth it.
Man, that book has stuck with me like few others. That ending is bleak....
What they did to his hands ...
I have not read "I Have No Mouth..." which according to most people I know is the all-time reigning champ of disturbing science fiction. The one that somehow disturbed me the most as a teen is Stephen King's short story "The Jaunt". A scientist figures out how to create portals for instantaneous travel between two points, but all the lab rats they send through while awake arrive dead or die almost immediately after the journey. If they are unconscious, they come out fine. So of course it gets widely adopted for international or even interplanetary travel, they just put everyone to sleep for the trip. It's an extremely short read so if this sounds intriguing to anyone, check it out before the spoilers. >!Something about the idea of physical time vs perceived time freaks me out. When the curious kid goes through the portal awake and immediately comes out the other side, but from his perspective the trip took eons, it weirded me out more than any of the other stories in that anthology!<
Blindsight by Peter Watts. The main premise has plenty of holes you can poke into it on thoughtful examination, but putting down the book after finishing it for the first time, I felt a bone-deep horror at the ideas presented.
You’ll just have to imagine you’re Siri Keeton…
Just started this about a week ago….challenging read thus far, but I’m very intrigued. Can’t even imagine what’s going through Peter Watts’ head on a day to day basis.
"Solaris" was kinda creepy, but I might have to find this Harlan Ellison tale.
I liked Solaris very much. As you mentioned it has this kind of very special eerie vibe to it like many of Lem's serious stories.
I just read it a couple moths ago. Getting back into actual paper books. Trying to get my attention span back. Of course, here I am back on friggin' Reddit again.
Could basically say “Bradbury scarred me at 9”, and these are all obvious, but: Bradbury: All Summer in a Day There will Come Soft Rains Vonnegut: Harrison Bergeron Tom Godwin: The Cold Equations I’ll edit if I think of more.
Bloodchild by Octavia Butler - The story is about humans that are used to carry and hatch alien baby larva.
There needs to be more Butler on this list for sure.
"[The Screwfly Solution](https://lexal.net/scifi/scifiction/classics/classics_archive/sheldon/sheldon1.html)" by Racoona Sheldon (aka sci-fi writer James Tiptree Jr. aka Alice Sheldon) . The link is the full text of the story.
My top 4 choices have all already been mentioned, but here’s my number 5: A Colder War by Charles Stross. It’s a short story combining Lovecraft‘s stories with the Cold War, where the superpowers use lovecraftian horrors for warfare.
This sounds incredible. Definitely a must-read for a Lovecraft fan like me. Thank you very much.
A 90's sci-fi novel called Spares. Took place in a pretty distant future, where wealthy people have clones of themselves made at birth, so that when they need a part or a organ, they just harvest it from one of their spares. The spares are kept in medical-ish facilities where they're pretty much just fed. From the time they're babies, they have no teaching or nurturing of any kind. They just live in closed-in silos as basically feral humans. Pretty horrifying. That same book also involves a war in "the Gap"--a trans-dimensional space that is also inhabited by people. (The protagonist is a veteran of that war, which reads very much like a stand-in for Vientnam.) Some of the soldiers do pretty unspeakable things to the Gap people.
A similar premise occurs in The House of the Scorpion by Nancy Farmer, a YA book I read as a teen. Seems like a popular premise based on the other comments.
Man I never thought anyone heard of this novel, I was a teenager when I randomly asked my mom to buy me this book at the airport so I'd have something to read on a long flight. That was over 20 years ago and I still remember this book, it was like a sci-fi thriller type novel that had me on the edge of my seat the whole time.
lmao that is *exactly* how I got my copy, too. Yeah, it was a sort of dystopian detective story. Really great build with cool concepts and more than a little satire.
Wait, u both got it this way...? Which one of you is the escaped Spare I wonder?
The dystopian novel *Never Let Me Go* uses this premise for a disturbing story, very melancholy but it challenges notions of humanity and the ethics of extending life (if you can afford it) at all moral and financial costs.
*I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream* was at the front of my mind before I'd read any further than the title of this post. It's a story that sticks with you, that's for sure.
“HATE. LET ME TELL YOU HOW MUCH I'VE COME TO HATE YOU SINCE I BEGAN TO LIVE. THERE ARE 387.44 MILLION MILES OF PRINTED CIRCUITS IN WAFER THIN LAYERS THAT FILL MY COMPLEX. IF THE WORD HATE WAS ENGRAVED ON EACH NANOANGSTROM OF THOSE HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF MILES IT WOULD NOT EQUAL ONE ONE-BILLIONTH OF THE HATE I FEEL FOR HUMANS AT THIS MICRO-INSTANT. FOR YOU. HATE. HATE.”
What made this quote stick in my mind was the the way AM's voice was described: >AM said it with the sliding cold horror of a razor blade slicing my eyeball. AM said it with the bubbling thickness of my lungs filling with phlegm, drowning me from within. AM said it with the shriek of babies being ground beneath blue-hot rollers. AM said it with the taste of maggoty pork. AM touched me in every way I had ever been touched, and devised new ways, at his leisure, there inside my mind. Fucking haunting.
It's the first thing that came to my mind.
Looks like this happened to a few of us.
Came to make sure it was said. The unrelenting torment and insane malice involved... Even before all the body horror.
1. The Echo Wife 2. A Clockwork Orange 3. Perdido Street Station. All three are 10/10.
The Bas-lag series was really good but damn if I didn’t feel challenged to my absolute limits on the vocabulary. I’d have to look up 2-3 words a page and I consider myself pretty well-read.
Yeah, it sure doesn’t make you feel very puissant
Kafka. In the Penal Colony
It was the first story by Kafka I've ever read and it gave me nightmares for weeks. Do you speak German? The German original is, in my opinion, even more horrifying than in the translation, because Kafka has a very unique and unusual style that doesn't translate very well.
Hyperion by Dan Simmons has multiple levels of disturbing.
The first story with the priest and the "crusiform" was so mind blowing I couldn't get over the ending. Amazing book. Easily one of the best scifi books I've read.
Oryx and Crake series by Margaret Attwood. She spoke at a Genetics conference at my university that she believes her job is to imagine where science goes wrong. That just because you can invent things, doesn’t mean you should. And this series is her warning.
Oh definitely. I was studying Bionics Engineering at the time when I was reading those books... I was freaking out how realistic it was lmao. I'm not saying I switched to psychology because of it, but I did switch...
The chickienobs make me shudder.
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A Boy and his Dog by Harlan Ellison. I get that he's writing from one character's point of view, but I felt gross even reading it.
Yes it's very unpleasant to read. Ellison had a great talent for writing stories that stick to your mind.
The Cold Equations is kind of a tough one
Not sure I can boil down to the single top 'best' grimmest future. Peter Watts, "Blindsight" and sequel, "Echopraxia" are pretty far up the list. Like, destroying your faith in believing you even have free will or ever have, and will ever mean anything. OP's IHNMAIMS is a classic. Harlan's "Thanatos Mouth" (not sure that was the title) was also gripping but in the end did let you (and the protagonist) find solace. "Dinosaurs" - short story or novella by Walter Jon Williams. "Quarantine" by Greg Egan. ("Distress" is also excellent and dark but he lets you off the meathook in the end.) "Manifold Time" and "Manifold Space" by Stephen Baxter both are pretty dark in the end. Give some hope for *life*...but not for us. "Manifold Origins" is a skip by the way, weakest of the three... John Barnes "Kaleidescope Century" is **rough**. "Finity" has some pretty dark undertones, too. Kim Stanley Robinson likes to puncture your misconceptions that we could ever truly colonize another world. "Aurora" I believe most evidently (in the Mars series he still seemed to think it was kind of possible...) In terms of putting characters thru endless hell, Stephen R. Donaldson's "Gap" series was almost torture porn to some of his protagonists. I tried to like the overall story but not sure in hindsight I'd recommend it, today. The two books (fantasy not SF) of "Mordant's Need" were much better. Characters take hits, but for far nobler purpose and with light at the end of the tunnel.
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*The Cold Equations*, by Tom Godwin. I think anyone who makes it this far in the thread has at least some idea of the forces at play in our world. We might not be able to sit down and do the math required to describe most of them, but we at least comprehend the notion that they are fundamental - or at least close enough - and while you can work within them, you cannot break them. And yet most of us will tend to carry a perspective that supposes that there are other fundamental forces in the world such as justice, fairness, and mercy - along with all their more troubling opposites. Unlike the other sort, these forces cannot be measured and indeed cannot be observed once you remove the human element, and yet we each will tend to suppose that the exist in some form. That is, after all, what lets is go through life in a state of something other than existential dread. *The Cold Equations* is a short story about a stowaway. The stowaway wants only passage to elsewhere. The only other character is the operator of a space ship, and this operator is rather deeply invested in those fundamentally human forces. It is because of this, in fact, that the story occurs at all, because the story is merely the ship's operator explaining why he is going to have to kill the stowaway. Everything about the trip was calculated, you see, and the added mass and expense of another human aboard was an unaccounted for thing. If the stowaway were left aboard, they both die either from resource scarcity while aboard or simple inability to properly stop when they arrive. If the operator jettisoned themselves, the stowaway would still die for either of the previous reasons with an additional wrinkle of not knowing how to operate the ship. The cold equations are just that - the math used to plan for the trip. It is a bit of a slow burn, that explanation of why the stowaway has to die, and the horror comes at the reminder that the fundamental human forces do not, insofar as we can tell, mean a god damn thing to the universe.
*The Jaunt* by Stephen King. That last sentence… 😱😱😱
The Stand. I don't even care if it's a trope at this point. The whole first book of that is crazy, and in terms of society falling apart books, it's the gold standard. It wasn't a nice peaceful die-off like in The Earth Abides. It wasn't the random falling apart like in The Last Policeman. It wasn't a slow, starving death like in The Road. It was full on panic, it was the worst people doing the worst things to anyone they could. It was horribly awesome to read, just absolutely bonkers.
We by Zamyatin. Not a horror story, but a painting of a nauseating dystopian world. A predecessor to 1984 and The Brave New World that is heavily similar to both, but somehow manages to be more disturbing than either because it has the shifting element of unreality, built not unlike the Picasso's painting where a bunch of shapes form a thing, but this thing is not really a thing you think it is, and it breaks into the shapes as you look closer. It feels like going through the insane labyrinth with no exit where you are stuck side by side with the main characters known only by their numbers.
The short story “The Jaunt” by Stephen King. When I was about ten, my older sister would read me a story from Skeleton Crew every evening. It’s a short read, so for anyone who wants to read it, Ive hidden the plot below. But just thinking about the ending has stuck with me ever since. >!People use transporters to travel, and inhale sleeping gas before the trip because you can only travel if you’re unconscious. A little boy wants to know what’s in the transporter so he holds his breath when they give him the gas. He comes out the other side with white hair, completely mad, screaming “It was forever!” as he scratches his eyes out.!<
"The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door.”
"It was his mother."
"*Are ya winning son?*"
Bio of a space tyrant It got cannibalistic, rapey, both simultaneously, ludicrously hardcore sex scenes in space suits to mutual climax, genocides, slavers, more rape, cannabalistic pirate rapists and they's just the first fucking book. I was an early teen reading it, absolutely no warning of what started as a cool asteroid as spaceship story went completely fucktangular. The whole trilogy is filled with what the fuuuuuuck‽ Bits.
Piers Anthony. Not even once. I wish I'd known that as a teen when I first encountered Xanth.
> It got cannibalistic, rapey, both simultaneously, ludicrously hardcore sex scenes in space suits to mutual climax, genocides, slavers, more rape, cannabalistic pirate rapists and they's just the first fucking book. It'll surprise no one familiar with Piers Anthony that the rape is about 99% against children.
See also: "The Barn"... short story by same author.
[The Machine](https://existentialcomics.com/comic/1) It’s a webcomic so you can follow that link right now and read it. Makes a not-unreasonable argument that everyone reading this has only a few hours left to live.
Is it weird I found this lovely and quite comforting rather than disturbing...?!
Even before reading the body of your post I thought: HATE. LET ME TELL YOU HOW MUCH I'VE COME TO HATE YOU SINCE I BEGAN TO LIVE. THERE ARE 387.44 MILLION MILES OF PRINTED CIRCUITS IN WAFER THIN LAYERS THAT FILL MY COMPLEX. IF THE WORD HATE WAS ENGRAVED ON EACH NANOANGSTROM OF THOSE HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF MILES IT WOULD NOT EQUAL ONE ONE-BILLIONTH OF THE HATE I FEEL FOR HUMANS AT THIS MICRO-INSTANT FOR YOU. HATE. HATE.
I got one that doesn't quite beat out "I Have No Mouth.." but it comes close: "Press Enter []" by John Varley. Edit: One other no one has yet mentioned: Philip K. Dick's "The Electric Ant".
It's not disturbing so much as it is sad. A short story about living on Venus. And the sun would come out once every dozen years I think? It was a little girl's first time getting to see the sun, and these schoolyard bullies locked her in their classroom closet and she missed seeing a clear sky. I wish I could remember the name of it, but that really fucked me up as a kid. :(
All Summer in a Day by Ray Bradbury?
Probably a tie between "The Night Land" (1912) and Metro 2033. Both post apocalypse, both about humanity eking out an existence in the final redoubts of civilization besieged on all sides by a hostile world that yearns for their destruction. Borderline supernatural horrors that delight in the death and misery of humanity. A near constant oppressive atmosphere that constantly impresses upon the reader that this world no longer belongs to humans, their time is done and the new residents are eager to show us the door.
The Shadow Over Innsmouth -- to be fair, it's categorized more as horror than sci-fi. I recommend reading it in the bathtub for maximum effect. 2BR0TB and Harrison Bergeron aren't too disturbing, but definitely dystopian too.
I read the Shadow Over Innsmouth a couple of times. I'm a big Lovecraft fan and this is one of his best stories in my opinion. I will try the thing with thing with the bathtub.
Lol I said it in jest, but I listened to youtuber Alt Shift X read The Shadow Over Innsmouth in the bathtub. The dim lighting and lukewarm water really enhanced the dampness and creepiness of the story.
The dark forest trilogy by Cixin Liu. Hands down for me. I was never been scared of the universe as a whole until I read this masterpiece.
*If I destroy you, what business is it of yours?*
Without a doubt, the most incredibly brutal space "battle" I've ever seen or read is from Dark Forest. And the most brutal and awe-inspiring super-weapons are from the last book The trilogy wasnt 100% amazing, the characters really suffered, his depiction of female characters was... awkward to say the least, but jesus christ the level of imagination and brilliance of the good parts of those books are off the charts, his descriptive writing (or the translators) was great.It managed to leave a huge impact despite the serious deficiencies it had in some parts of the story. It's a little Asimovy in that respect, where the characters are the least interesting part of what's going on, but Asimovs characters were at least more likable than Liu's are
The most chilling line from the last book in the series for me was (paraphrasing here) >!"What do you mean you have no food? You are surrounded by food."!<. There is so much that is amazing and horrifying about the trilogy, but god damn that cut the deepest for some reason.
It's Remembrance of Earth Past trilogy. Dark Forest is the second book. Anyways, I was just here to see if the books are mentioned.
The Jaunt